This month we focus on the work of the Women’s Timber Corps, who are often forgotten in discussion of the Women’s Land Army. Women would have undertaken this work all year around, but it only seems appropriate to draw attention to the diversity of the work they undertook.

From left to right, top to bottom:

Lumber Jills measuring trees to be sent off for use as telgraph poles and pit props near Wareham, Dorset. Source: Geoff Shute

My mother was in the Timber Corps, and I think she must have been in and around the pine forests near Wareham, Dorset, because on VE day she was in the Bear Hotel, Wareham, with other girls of the WLA, but my mother was not in the mood to celebrate, because my father was still in the far east, and his war was continuing.

My mother was born 26 September 1921 in Cologne, Germany, where her father was a Battery Sgt. Major in the Royal Horse Artillery, and stayed in Germany after the Great War, to serve in the British Army of Occupation on the Rhine. The family returned to Britain. But when they returned to Britain, my grandfather and his family were garrisoned at Dorchester Barracks, and when my grandfather eventually left the Army, the family bought a house in Dorchester, and that is where I was born. I do remember my mother telling me stories of her time there (Dorchester Barracks) and being woken in the mornings by the sound of the horses, limbers, and 25 pounder guns. I am assuming the photo of the school room is in Dorchester, somewhere. Most likely in Coberg Road, Victoria Park, Dorchester, Dorset.